I’m not nearly as experienced of a homebrewer as many of the other people attending the National Homebrewers Conference this past weekend at Mission Valley’s Town and Country Resort, but I’ve brewed a batch or two of beer in the past and plan to brew more in the future, and knew that regardless of homebrewing experience, I would take away a lot of general beer knowledge from the conference.
The highlight of the conference for me was a seminar given by Drew Beechum, President of the Los Angeles’s Maltose Falcon’s titled, A Saison for Every Season. Beechum, whose love of Saison’s seems to exceed mine (and I love Saisons), focused on what in my opinion makes Saison’s one of the most interesting beer styles: the yeast. Beechum brewed a fairly basic Saison recipe at Eagle Rock Brewery in Los Angeles and then separated the wort into different carboys pitching different yeast in each. All told about thirteen different yeasts were used and during the presentation we got to taste seven of them. With the only difference between each sample being the yeast, it was pretty striking how different from each other each was. My favorite, and according to a show of hands the favorite of many other people was the sample fermented with White Lab’s WLP585, it had a big ginger and citrus flavor and was pretty tart, unfortunately this yeast strain isn’t commercially available.
In addition to the differences in yeast, another takeaway from Beechum’s talk was his modern ideas about farmhouse ales. Very few (if any) of us are exclusively using ingredients we grow ourselves in our beers, but Beechum suggested the modern definition of farmhouse ale could be to use ingredients that are locally available to you as a brewer. “If this beer style were to arise around you, what would you be using?” Beechum asked. He did admit that living in Southern California we get to cheat a little because of the abundant variety of produce available to us. A few hours later at Club Night Beechum proved that he practices what he preaches with his Guacamole Saison, a Saison brewed with Avocado Honey and all the herbs and spices one would expect to find in guacamole. It didn’t taste like liquid guacamole (and I think that’s a good thing) but many of the flavors came through to make it an enjoyable, if slightly unusual, beer.
Another seminar with some great information was Jolly Pumpkin’s Ron Jeffries’s Brewing with Unusual Ingredients. Jeffries talked about, and shared recipes for, some of Jolly Pumpkin’s more unusual and experimental beers while giving tips and tricks on how and when to use these uncommon ingredients. Among the more unusual ingredients Jeffries offered information on were things like kale and spinach (shred and add to mash), bacon fat (rack onto it, drop the temperature and then rack off leaving the fat on the bottom) and basil (“Don’t put basil in beer”, Jeffries said with a laugh, offering up no further explanation).